Ferrari aims to increase pace in qualifying: Formula One news
Ferrari’s assistant technical director Pat Fry says that the pace of the scarlet car was good during the Australian Grand Prix, but the team will have to work hard to achieve speed in qualifying.
There were a lot of expectations from Ferrari after a promising show during the winter testing. However, the team failed to match the speed of Red Bull and McLaren during the qualifiers.
Fry stated, “After analysing qualifying and race data from Melbourne, there are already things we plan to change and improve for Malaysia. These will be added in to an already busy pre-planned test programme with further aerodynamic updates that were always planned for this race.”
He further added, “But we have also added a further three or four test items and probably there will be even more new parts to test arriving in the few days between the Malaysia and China races.”
Both the Ferrari drivers, Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa, struggled to get a quick lap together during qualifying at Melbourne and started fifth and eighth on the grid respectively.
The Spaniard had a better race compared to his team-mate. He finished the race in fourth place, but could have ended up on the podium. Alonso was on a three-stop strategy compared to Vitaly Petrov, who finished third, which cost him the chance to score more points.
On the other hand, Massa only managed to finish the race in seventh place. The Brazilian didn’t find grip and speed and only managed to finish in the points because of some retirements and penalties to other drivers.
Other than Ferrari, Mercedes was the other team which had a poor weekend. The German team brought their upgraded package to the final pre-season test at Barcelona and proved to be very strong in terms of pace and reliability.
However, drivers Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg didn’t manage to impress during the qualifiers and the seven-time champion didn’t even make it to the third round of qualifying. Adding insult to injury, both Mercedes cars were forced to retire from the race, giving them no points in the season opener.
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